Technologist bred and fascinated by the web. Have years of experience in full stack technologies and made the jump to management while still hands-on when needed. Thrive in the mix of technical and leadership roles, looking at management from the problem solving perspective and striving to improve every day. Keep my tech skills up to date by "scratching my own itch" with a couple of open-source projects.
Engineering Manager at Expedia in San Francisco, July 2015 - present
Having hands-on technical skills in this managerial position helps me to successfully scale and lead an energetic team of engineers who own the whole stack and deploy to production daily following Continuous Deployment practices.
- Built and lead a successful team of Developers and Technical Project Manager who own the complete Product & Tech Stack, and reliably deliver according to the Product expectations.
- Successfully doubled the team's size by on-boarding new team members in two new remote locations in less than two months while minimizing the impact on sprint velocity and deliverables.
- Successfully worked through the challenges of leading a distributed team across 4 locations in 3 distant timezones and adjusted the team's processes for optimal performance in this remote configuration.
- Hire new team members in a competitive market satisfying the given timeframe.
- Mentor and coach team members, empowering them to take decisions and to continuously improve themselves. Work through performance issues with team members when needed.
- Lay out the technical vision for the product, liaise with other teams and be the main project point person.
- Ensure quality is built-in and automated in the code.
- Write code, pair coding, perform code reviews and help debug issues. Main languages used are JavaScript, Java, HTML and CSS.
Tech Lead / Technical Project Manager at Expedia in San Francisco, October 2014 - July 2015
First role with people manager responsibilities in a small team of engineers where we owned the whole product and project.
- Main project point person and liaison with other teams and product stakeholders.
- Assumed the de-facto role of a Technical Project Manager / Delivery Manager and perfected the team's semi-kanban process.
- Hired, on-boarded and mentored new team members.
- Successfully lead the effort to scale the system to serve x5 more customers with the same team.
- Main front-end developer in the team, using mainly vanilla JS, LESS/CSS, HTML and node.
Front-end Engineer at Expedia in Singapore, October 2012 - October 2014
Main front-end developer of a fully-responsive, high-traffic, highly-available e-commerce website: AirAsiaGo. Wsed kanban & Continuous Deployment methodologies and followed Clean Code practices.
- Developed, tested and shipped cross-browser, responsive, retina-ready features and modules built with HTML5, JavaScript - jQuery, Backbone, AngularJS etc - CSS3 (LESS), SVG, sprites, etc. on top of a Spring (Java) back-end.
- Lead the team's front-end vision and evangelize best practices.
- Interacted with other teams proactively providing feedback on the difficulty/feasibility of the planned features.
- Optimized page load-time through minification, selective loading, changes in front-end architecture, usage of subdomain-per-asset CDNs, sprite and image compression, etc.
- Improved SEO ranking of the site using several techniques.
- Identified, debugged and fixed live-site issues (Splunk, Nagios, AWS monitoring, Google Analytics, etc.)
Tech Lead at Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore, June 2012 - October 2012
Lead a team of 5 developers working on the front-end interface of RMWB (Relation Manager WorkBench) project for Standard Chartered Bank.
Our responsibility was to develop and ship the front-end of the application the customers would use.
- Hands-on technical design and implementation of new features given the business requirements.
- Lead implementation and Quality Control.
- Feature planning and Bug tracking (JIRA).
- Be the point of contact between the Business and the team.
Sr. Web Developer at Optimum Solutions in Singapore, January 2012 - June 2012
Worked on the RMWB (Relation Manager WorkBench) project for Standard Chartered Bank. My main contributions in this role where:
- Integrated an already existing web-application from a third-party vendor following given designs and using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSPs into the RMWB portal which also grouped information from CreditMate and MicroStrategy Systems in a web-based interface. Also developed web services to expose data from the backend (Java, Spring).
- Conducted technical interviews for Web Developer / Web Designers roles.
Analyst at Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria in Madrid, September 2010 - December 2011
Worked on the Mentor project at Wholesale Banking & Asset Management, Global Risk Unit. Mentor was a web-based project to integrate, unify, organize and report all the unit’s risk data from diverse systems with different data outputs.
- Helped design and code the project's foundations and initial setup from scratch (Maven config files, project file structure, initial setup).
- Developed a complex parser for a legacy system output (Algorithmics) making exhaustive use of Regular Expressions to translate the output to comprehensive, coherent JPA models.
- Architecture, Design and implementation of the application’s web-based user-facing interface with JSP, HTML and JavaScript (jQuery, Ajax, async plugin loading).
- Lead and oversaw the front-end development and ensured best practices were followed.
- Interacted with business stakeholders while gathering requirements, designing new features and reporting the status of the project.
Developer at Safelayer Secure Communications in Barcelona, February 2009 - September 2010
Invented, designed and implemented a proof of concept of gOTP, a novel two-factor authentication system which combined the robustness of One Time Passwords and the easily-remembered Graphical Passwords. The project was initially developed as a joint R&D Final Degree Project at UPC (see below) and Safelayer company, to become a product of the latter.
The implementation had two parts:
- iPhone Application as the client. Developed with Objective-C, Cocoa Touch Framework, Xcode.
- Grails (Groovy on Rails) application as the server. I used Groovy, Java, ant, Maven, SVN, MySQL, ExtJS (Sencha), Web Services.
Computer Engineering, 2004-2009 at Barcelona School of Informatics (FIB), Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in Barcelona (Spain)
Degree + MSC. Graduated with Honors in the final Degree project "A Secure Authentication System via OTP and Graphical Password"
Other Courses
- Startup Engineering, 2013 at Coursera (Stanford University)
- Spring Training, 2011 at SpringSource University
- iPhone Application Programming, 2009 at iTunesU (Stanford University)
You can see my recommendations on my Linkedin Profile (more available upon request).
I love photography and traveling.
- Email: gamell [at] gamell [dot] io
- Phone: +1 415 825 2758
- Currently residing in San Francisco
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/gamell
- My interactive resume and portfolio online at: http://gamell.io